Subject: Re: what we're up against
From: Todd D Millstein (todd@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Sun Mar 11 2001 - 11:56:30 PST
As it turns out, this story has a happy ending. After talking more with
that professor, I think we're pretty much in agreement. Certainly static
analysis has had some problems, notably decades of work on formal
verification that arguably has not achieved much success. But just as
certainly, more limited forms of static analysis have had success. As an
example, recently there have been quite a few successful uses of static
analysis for systems security -- Necula's PCC, David Wagner's static
buffer overrun detection, and Dawson Engler's stuff on finding bugs in OS
kernels, to name three.
In any case, I think I probably made a bigger deal out of that professor's
comment than it really was. He was echoing things he'd heard from others,
but I'm not sure he really believed it that strongly. In any case, now I
don't think he'll say that again (at least not in front of me)!
Todd
On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, Todd D Millstein wrote:
>
> An anecdote:
>
> I happened to go to lunch today with an unnamed faculty member. In the
> course of discussing an unnamed faculty candidate, the faculty member said
> that one downside of the candidate was his/her interest in static analysis
> and dynamic analysis, and this faculty member, whose research is unrelated
> to these areas, had heard that static and dynamic analysis are dead fields
> -- people have been doing them for 20 years, and there's nothing more to
> do that can be done.
>
> I found this comment astounding and disturbing. I think this faculty
> member was completely well meaning, but how does somebody take on faith
> that a huge area of research (arguably encompassing much of programming
> languages, compilers, and software engineering) is dead? And how does
> this impression get started in the first place? Worse, I get the uneasy
> feeling that this faculty member is not alone.
>
> Why does our field get such bad PR? Is it more deserved than other
> fields? If so, how can we address that? If not, how can we change the
> way we present our work to affect public opinion more positively?
>
> Todd
>
>
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